Overheard: Word of the Day

And now with a huge portion of the COBOL workforce retiring (i.e. baby boomers) there is a sense of panic as the ecosystem is threatened by a looming shortage of staff and a scramble to snatch up those few green screen programmers remaining. So here are my questions: Did nobody see this coming? Was anybody paying attention? And what lessons will we learn from this that we can apply to our own little ecosystems of java, PHP, Ruby, and .NET?

Tuesday, June 23rd, Vice President Biden and the Middle Class Task Force went to Perrysburg, Ohio to promote manufacturing. The Vice President hosted a discussion on the state of manufacturing. From what I could gather reading through the local news feeds,”retooling” and “renewable energy” were the buzzwords-of-the-day. If you’re a discrete manufacturer for automobile parts, for instance, you might want to picture yourself making parts for wind turbines or solar panels instead.

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge.Leon Chua as quoted in ‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

A memristor can be thought of as a resistor that changes its resistance depending on the amount of current that’s sent through it — and the big deal is that it retains its resistance even after the power is turned off. Memristors are in the news again because engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed flexible memristor-like electronic memory chips. It could be big news for consumer electronics because it opens up the possibility that memory chips can be printed just as simply and inexpensively as overhead transparencies.

Only 9% of CIOs said they planned to increase IT outsourcing this year, according to the latest update to Gartner Inc.’s 2009 CIO Agenda survey, and many are considering insourcing previously outsourced functions.

The survey, which ranked CIOs’ top priorities, found that “improving business processes” topped the list once again this year, with 57% naming it as a top concern. Following that was “reducing enterprise costs” with 51% and “improving enterprise workforce effectiveness,” which was up three spots from last year and garnered 37%.

The funny thing about using Dragon Naturally Speaking is that it’s tempting to look at the screen as you’re dictating to make sure the software is typing what you’re actually saying.

There’s something mesmerizing about seeing what you say appear magically on the screen as text. And of course you don’t want the Dragon to put down gibberish or make so small mistakes that it appears you’ve been drinking something stronger than coffee all day. So when you start using Dragon, it’s kind of natural that to want to supervise the software.

If you keep looking, though, you’ll probably negate any advantage the software offers. It’s too tempting to spend time self-correcting and self-editing and not enough time talking out ideas. And just like Narcissus, the guy who was fascinated with his own reflection, you’ll perish.

When you’re riding the dragon, you need to focus on flying ahead. My advice? Don’t look down till the trip is over.

IT demand is very strong. Companies have had to work harder than ever to make money in this environment and also to be able to drive the types of innovation that will keep customers interested in new things they’re offering. But CIOs are meeting that demand with existing IT assets rather than buying new assets.

In other words, they’re managing the IT MOOSE and they like their MOOSE lean.

Mark points out that the number of IT transactions are increasing — but not all those transactions can be directly tied to revenue. (That reminds me. I need to log on and check my bank balance.) As the number of transactions to support $1 in revenue continue to go up, Mark predicts that CIOs will be taking a hard look at infrastructure again.

The question is…whose infrastructure will they be looking at? Their own — or Amazon’s or EMC’s or some other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider?

“The challenge with gesture control, as one panelist put it, is that we don’t have any universal body language for a lot of the actions we’d want gesture control to accomplish. For example, there’s no widely shared gesture that means ‘turn it off,’ so programmers would need to invent one, and then hope users would be willing to learn it.”

As part of a webcast on Understanding the ITIL Trinity of Configuration Change and Release Management, George says that:

29% of projects deliver on-time with expected features

53% are challenged (are delivered on-time without expected features)

18% outright fail outright

It’s not surprising that George attributes these dismal numbers to non-technical factors, including lack of project planning, poor requirements definition, not getting the right stakeholders involved, poor communication and insufficient management oversight.

I’m frankly surprised that the number of projects that deliver on-time with expected features is so high. I would have guessed…3%.

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is personality profile. It’s getting some buzz this week because of an article on CIO.com where Sherrie Haynie, an organizational consultant with CPP Inc. (an HR consultancy and the publisher of the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator assessment) was quoted as saying that about 60 percent of technology professionals who’ve taken a Myers-Briggs assessment with CPP are ISTJs.

I’m a big fan of having a team take the Myers-Briggs test together. Sitting around discussing the results and learning to appreciate the talents of your co-workers is a valuable experience for any group of co-workers.

About This Blog

Overheard in the tech blogosphere is like an impressionist painting about information technology. Close up, it’s just a bunch of colorful quotes. Take a step back and look at all the posts together — and you begin to see a picture.